Wednesday, February 22, 2017

Another week has flown by & we've officially crossed the halfway mark of our second term! Pretty amazing because for a while it felt like we were just treading water. We officially wrapped up week 5 & week 6 of our term over the past 2 weeks. Yep, one more "double-up" week in review post so that I can get caught up. Crazy as it sounds, I find I'm putting off my WIR posts when I'm behind because while we do a lot of work in a week {or rather the kids do} I find it harder to recall when I'm in the midst of a new week of happenings.

We celebrated a birthday in week 15, as Morgan turned 16. While most people are in shock that their child is turning 16, & it's not that we weren't, we were more impressed that for the first time in years upon years {or so it seemed} that Valentine's Day did not fall in the exact same week as our son's birthday. Yeah, it caused a bit of a stir in our home!

Morgan officially wrapped up his math book, & is currently awaiting the arrival of his new Algebra book. Exciting times, all though he feels a little stress as he'd hoped to wrap up the previous book a bit sooner then he did. It's all good though, & knowing this child he'll excel with the next book & be fine despite the small hiccup.

Jayden spent 2 weeks on Lesson 27 in his math book. For those looking for tips, Lesson #27 in Epsilon deals with both area & circumference of a circle all in one go. From previous experience I found this to be information overload for a student as they need time to practice each way without concern they are using the wrong method. So for Jayde we split it up over 2 weeks, & it worked really well for us. He's in the home stretch with his math book as well. I told him he can thank his brother for being the guinea pig which has made his own transition through the pre-algebra sections very simple.

Morgan buckled down with his science to get back into the swing of things. I was a little worried for him that having waiting so long to get back to it this term that he might find himself needing to do make-up time with it, but after surveying the schedule & the school calendar he'll be fine. Module 3 of Marine Biology was a tough one, but he did enjoy the information. He also realised he didn't take notes through the module like he normally does & he felt this greatly impacted his retention level. I love that he discovered this without any urging from me, it means he's more likely to apply the knowledge he gained.

Jayden is still humming along with the BkSk science that he's working on. Our goal is to get him through the chemistry portion before term break. We'll see if we meet that goal. Oddly enough all experiments for this entire year are based on Chemistry despite the fact that he'll touch on 2 other topics. We may have to scan our home shelves for experiment books or pull out some kits.

Both boys are still working away at their core work {history.} Morgan is in Volume 5 of HUS & still enjoying things. He has one more volume to finish & a total of 3 books to wrap up before Term Break. It's always fun to see the end in sight & we're all eager for a break! Jayden has 2 books to wrap up before term break & is hoping to clear MOH 1 off his list before break as well.

We didn't line up MOH & SOTW, it wasn't my objective when we began things. Rather we've just read a chapter or two of MOH each time he sits down & reads from SOTW. I think if your goal is to finish them both at the same time you'd need to do 2-3 chapters of MOH for each chapter of SOTW. If you wanted to match them up there are many sources for that already from Winter Promise's curriculum to schedules over on RedShift.

From doing these 2 cores previously I'm not sure if we'll do all 4 levels of MOH along side it or not. In fairness the first 2 levels of MOH are much lighter in content & the lessons range from 2 minutes to 10 minutes. Where as Levels 3 & 4 have far meatier content. In an ideal world it would be amazing to do them side by side, but reality tends to be a little different.

There were some major mapping assignments that happened. Morgan needed to map out what certain territories looked like "back in the day" in order to be well versed on that for an upcoming quiz he has. It's been quite interesting to watch the way the land unfolded to be honest! Yes, he uses the Hewitt Tests to go along with the HUS volumes.

Jayden's timeline continues to grow! It's been just as much fun watching that expand each week too. I'm actually a bit concerned about spacing issues by the time he's made it through 2 years of world history, but we're all enjoying seeing things unfolds on the timeline. There was a debate between kids the other day over what event happened first so they ran to the timeline to check it out. I wish Morgan was putting one up of US history to watch it unfold as well, because that would be equally interesting!

Morgan started using the videos over at You ARE an Artist! He's my very artsy child & really shines with things like this. We were delighted to be asked to try out the programme, & Morgan was smitten with his first project. For a child who can't see well on white paper & struggles with hues of red, yellow, & orange the fact that his apple looks like an apple is just so impressive to me! He was a little annoyed his chalk pastels were limited in colour because it meant he had to come up with some unusual colours for the next video or two. I told him if he was able to wait I'd purchase him a new set, which is currently somewhere between here & South Korea. I can't wait for them to arrive to see what he creates next.

What I will say is that because he loves to sketch in his sketch book we found that it might be wiser to cover your chalk pastel paintings with clear contact paper to keep the chalks from rubbing off onto other art work or blank pages. Of course this means I need to go buy some because the timeline has currently used up all we had!

There were, of course, birthday celebrations in our week. Due to gluten & dairy allergies I traditionally make an ice cream pie for birthdays. It's the most simplistic thing to make that everyone can enjoy a small bit of, but I really wanted to make something a bit more this year for the birthday cakes. The boys has been asking for a Black Forest cake for ages, but let's just say it's not a simple task with dairy issues. Over Christmas we'd tried out some lovely coconut whipping cream from our favourite Allergy Friendly shop & as it was a huge hit I decided to stock up on some & really surprised the birthday boy.

I used our normal chocolate cake recipe, but doubled it. Gluten free good don't rise as high as glutenous goods do. This simply means you need to make your pans nearly full when you bake cakes, muffins, & breads of you'll get the typical short gluten free baked goods. I subbed our normal dairy free milk for the milk & used a GF baking mix we buy in bulk. Once the cakes were cooked {this cake is super moist} I frozen the 2 layers until they were firm enough to cut in half with our electric knife. Then I doused them in cherry juice & covered the up for the night. From there it was pretty easy to make as normal. It was a HUGE hit all around & deemed "So delicious we have to have this again!" Mr S was a little bummed he only got two slices of that massive cake. Ha, I think I know what cake he'll get for his birthday.

We spent the afternoon of Morgan's birthday at the pool with the local homeschool group. Morgan opted in on the water slide as well & a grand time was had by all. They came home with massive appetites ready to indulge in the birthday burgers that were on the menu. There are no photos of the burgers, but there were a lot of laughs over them being too big to get into one's mouth.

Spelling has been a minor wash, these kids who don't spell much correctly outside of spelling tests have knocked the last several lists of words out of the park on the first try. Not that I'm complaining, but I did suggest that if they can do so well on the tests they might want to apply that to the notes they leave laying around. We are on track with our IEW Fix-It grammar lessons which is a delight. We should wrap up the book by the end of our term & then we'll jump right into the next one.

Last week our Daikin was finally, at long last, repaired! This meant we grabbed as much of our work as we could & moved to the kitchen so the repairman wouldn't feel the need to keep quiet with his work. This also meant that the birds could see our every move & were not pleased to be left out of things. They generally join us for our morning basket time & then return to have their breakfast while seat work is accomplished. I find that they are very naughty if they join us for seat work & prefer to eat papers, pencils, & rip keys off the computer.

We hit the beach one weekend because we were suppose to collect some sponge for an upcoming lab Morgan had going on, but in our explorations we totally forgot the sponge. Much is still washing ashore from the floods we had last year & it's quite crazy what you can find along your walk. Of course the dog had to find himself a cow that had washed ashore {yuck!} It was actually at another portion of the beach & moved a few kilometres down, so we weren't expecting it. Crazy dog decided to make himself all gacky smelling & was most disgusted with us when we dragged him into the ocean for a wash. Once we let him go he went back to the shore & sat there barking at us while we had a splash in the waves.

We watched a video on Octopi eggs hatching a while back & when we stumbled upon this on our walk we were trying to decide if they were infertile eggs or not. One child decided to break one open & the contents that came out were thick like the white of an egg. We'll have to seek out someone in the know to find out what they were!

We made a second trip to the beach & actually remembered the sponge, in fact we spotted a person who might have been able to help identify the "eggs", but alas he was in his truck & we felt it wrong to wave him down over a nature question.

I shocked the gang with some cut out cookies for Valentine's Day. Yep, gluten, egg, & dairy free. I even frosted a few of them! I'll have to share the recipe in another post for those who may be interested.

We're still working our way through Anne of Green Gables. In fact, a bit of a funny to share.. someone misspelled anoint the other day because they called out how to spell it I said, "You know it's an + oint!" So the child came back with Anneoint. We had ourselves a great laugh about it in the end! It felt like a bit of a slog at times with our last poet, but our current poet, Emily Dickinson, are very very enjoyable & we're very ahead of the proposed schedule. We're still reading through 2 Chronicles.

I'm sure I've forgotten something as we have Cover Story happening, are still reading about a president each week, working in Aussie History, & other little things, but that's about the sum of it for the past 2 weeks of learning in our home. Pretty full weeks, but it's what makes those weeks off so much more enjoyable, isn't it?